Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has written several articles on British and American authors. In this essay she examines the theme of aggression and resistance in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine.

Monaco, in her article on Lillian Hellman for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that the appearance of Watch on the Rhine on Broadway in 1941, eight months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, responded to "the political climate of the day," entering into "the continuing debate on American neutrality." She concludes that Americans were already familiar with the Nazi threat but had never before imagined "an antifascist message within a domestic situation."

In 1941 fascism, a totalitarian system of government that takes absolute control of the lives of its people, emerged as the dominant political force in war-torn Europe as Nazi aggression continued to spread...